Noah Warren

Worst book of poems I've read in a while. Embarrassingly trite and unbearably smug, this book fails in a way that makes other poems, maybe all poems, seem worse - like a spreading stain or like an infection. Disqualifying lines like "pale millionaires swill Starbucks"(p. 26) are enough of a problem. Word choice like describing his love for his mother as "impregnable"(p. 44) or lounging pool-side in his twenties as the "prime of my decay"(p.72) are in nearly every poem. The tone could be described as a gravely misplaced "distasteful superiority" (p. 54). There are plenty of terrible poems in the world. What makes this book particularly painful is the thought it might have been otherwise. Moments like "How slowly you pivot, / turning on me that eye that / before coffee is a whale's eye, / closing, worldless" (p. 48), clunky syntax aside, hint at what might have been salvaged. Instead, a total waste.… (meer)